COMPARE AND CONTRAST

Compare and contrast

Compare and contrast

Mexicans in the Midwest By: Juan R. Garcia vs Mexican

The study focuses on the experiences of the 'Mexican Generation' because the majority of immigrants to the region were Mexican nationals. Although the experiences of these nationals varied, some overarching characteristics distinguished them from their counter parts in the Southwest. Mexican immigrants to the Midwest were largely young, unattached males. Most of them saw their stay in the Midwest as temporary; thus, very few sought naturalization or citizenship. Midwestern economics and employment practices made them a highly mobile population. This mobility and the predominance of males profoundly affected the development and dynamics of Mexican communities in the Midwest.

People of Mexican ancestry have lived in the Midwest for most of the twentieth century, yet there are few historical monographs that detail this history. Today, Mexicans and their descendants constitute one of the largest ethnic groups in the Great Lakes region, with Chicago the largest such community outside the Southwest. This is not a concentrated population, since Mexicans and Mexican-Americans have long established barrios in the other large cities and the small towns and cities of the Midwest. Although Mexicans and Mexican-Americans have for many years made up a significant population group within this region, until recently scholarship has been focused on California, Texas, and the southwestern United States.

With the exceptions of Dennis Valdes and Zaragosa Vargas, most mainstream Chicano or Mexican-American scholars have overlooked the history of people with Mexican ancestry in the Midwest, despite the fact that many generations of U.S. citizens with such ancestries have made this region their home. Juan Garcia's book is thus a welcome addition and has the distinction of being the first survey of the early-twentieth-century history of the midwestern Mexican-ancestry population. The book, now available in paperback, is readable, well organized, and quite suitable for use in the undergraduate classroom.

Garcia has written a finely tuned survey text, and he provides the reader with a detailed overview of the history of Mexican life in the Midwest in the first three decades of the twentieth century. Mainly focused on Chicago and northern Indiana, the most impressive sections of this useful text come in the chapters detailing the role played by Mexican immigrant elites seeking to foster Mexican nationalist tendencies among recent migrants and in those that detail the social life of immigrants. Middle-class efforts to establish themselves as the gente preparada and tie the Mexican immigrants to them and the consular officials of the Mexican state place early-twentieth-century nationalism in clearer focus as a form of class-driven power politics.

In their newspapers and organizations, members of the Mexican immigrant elite created a mythical Mexican tradition, and they tried to encourage immigrants to improve hygiene, learn proper Spanish, and reject Protestantism, acculturation, and U.S. citizenship. Interestingly, it appears that these efforts might have had a negative impact in that the lack of citizenship appears to have given nonelite Mexican immigrants little voice in their new surroundings, especially in ...